Call for papers: Solidarities towards anticolonial worldbuilding
The 13th annual workshop of the Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group (CPD) will be a one-day hybrid workshop focusing on solidarities towards anticolonial worldbuilding. The workshop builds on the discussions from CPD stream panels at BISA conferences in Belfast and Brighton. The workshop will be held on Friday 4 December 2026 at Queen Mary University of London.
This workshop will invite early-career researchers, established scholars and organisers engaging in building transnational solidarities. We are interested in the frameworks through which solidarity, its ideas and praxes become thinkable and liveable. Thinking about solidarity crucially demands that we recognise the many plural and possible coalitions, relations and shared understandings that allow struggles to recognise one another and refuse the fragmentations imposed by colonial-capitalist and their attendant logics. The workshop will centre both the imaginaries and the practical/material forms of solidarity. In doing so, we want to think through not only what solidarity does, but what it makes possible beyond the terms offered by the global colonial and genocidal present.In thinking about praxes of solidarity, the workshop will also centre the everyday, embodied and often laborious work of building solidarity across differential positions and invite contributions that attend to the frictions, failures and contradictions of solidarity work, as much as its possibilities. We approach anticolonial world-building not as a destination but as an active, plural and unfinished process.
Some possible (but non-exhaustive) themes include:
- Possibilities and practices of solidarity
- Imaginaries of solidarity; third-world solidarity building
- Practices of transnational solidarity
- Queer, Feminist and Trans approaches to solidarity
- Disability Justice and solidarities towards liberation
- Political education
- Genealogies/memories of solidarity: how do we build on previous and historical solidarity movements; how collective memory and relations can ground solidarity over time.
- Critiques of shallow solidarity: how can our framing of solidarity move towards collective and meaningful forms?
- Solidarity as an epistemology
- Refusal as solidarity
- Material forms of solidarity: mutual aid, care infrastructures, labour movements, boycotts, funding, resources, witnessing, etc. and its politics
- Fragmentation and tension - how to practice solidarity beyond them?
CPD workshops are participatory and involve interactive knowledge exchange. They are aimed towards building a sense of community among members.
For participation
If you’d like to join us, please send us an email with a few thoughts about how your work/interests respond to these themes, as well as a few lines about who you are. If you do not have funding available for your travel/accommodation, particularly as an early career researcher, please also note this in your email. While the workshop is hybrid, we encourage in-person participation for those who are able to travel to London and we can help provide some bursaries to enable this.
In the workshop, participants will be expected to make a short intervention (7-8 minutes) based on their work that speak to the workshop’s focus. We will try to accommodate as many of those interested as possible, and we will have a few bursaries available for our early-career and student participants. The workshop will end with an interactive, discussion space on disability justice. Please indicate your interest in attending no later than 30 October 2026 to cpd.group@bisa.ac.uk.
The CPD Working Group has become an established community of scholars drawn from within and beyond IR – this interdisciplinarity has enriched the work and activities of the community as a whole. Our annual workshop is our most important event and provides a vital space for early career-scholars to connect with more established academics working through the colonial question in their research. As in previous years, this will be an innovative and participatory event with a range of heterodox sessions.